When we last covered Jamendo 10 months ago, we noted it had “one of the greatest libraries of free music online”. Yet a site redesign last week might put Jamendo in jeopardy.
The new design, which went live almost a week ago, contains very little information about the licenses used, making it all but impossible for site users to comply with them.
Creative Commons is a widely used (including by TorrentFreak) licence system that gives artists/creators the ability to grant permissions for reuse.
The terms are specified in the license, and have become an internet standard in many ways. Yet without an easy way to tell which of the licenses is being used, it causes problems for reuse and distribution – the entire point of both the license, and Jamendo.
Worse, since the work’s license is not being displayed adequately (as described in Creative Common’s guide to marking content) Jamendo may be in breach of the Creative Commons license themselves.
Creative Commons told us that it was not ideal, and that they will be reaching out to Jamendo to fix things and make licensing clearer.
Morgane Dourthe, Sales Team Leader at Jamendo told TorrentFreak “This new version of Jamendo is a first release and a lot things still needs to be improved and modified.” They added that they would be discussing many points this week, and that this would be among them.
For the sake of clarity and compliance, for both artists and users, the sooner the better.
